Email Open Rates: A Comprehensive Guide Into How To Improve Them

Email open rate is a potential precursor for the amazing results you expect from your campaigns. Here’s a detailed guide to achieving a great number…

At least 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis. Email is a powerful communication medium and a highly effective marketing strategy for businesses. In fact, email marketing offers a powerful means to nurture leads, boost online sales, and earn customer loyalty in an appealing, empathetic, and non-invasive way. With proper planning and flawless execution, it can also deliver many other benefits:

• Help you connect with and engage with customers and prospects in meaningful ways
• Drive traffic to your website, blog, and eCommerce store
• Leverage personalization data to show the right products to each customer and thus increase online sales
• Reduce customers’ “overwhelm” with relevant, personalized, and timely information

If all these benefits are not enough, email marketing can also lower your marketing costs while generating a very high ROI of up to 4400%. This is higher than any other medium, including social media!

But you can realize these advantages only if your brand’s email campaigns perform the way they should. And to gauge whether this is actually happening, you must define your specific goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). By setting the right KPIs before a campaign launch, measuring campaign performance after launch, and then comparing the what-is against the what-should-be, you will know whether your campaign is a success – or not.

One of the most vital KPIs to consider is how many people open your emails in order to read and engage with them. This is also known as the email open rate.

So what is email open rate (or average email open rate)?

How is it measured?

Why is it important to measure it?

What is a “good” email open rate?

Are there differences in email open rate by industry? Is there an industry average email open rate?

How can you increase email open rates for your brand’s campaigns?

This detailed guide will provide the answers to all these questions and more.

Let’s get started!

Table Of Contents

• What is the email open rate? How is it calculated?
• What is a “good” email open rate?
• A 5-Step Process to Benchmark Your Own Average Email Open Rate
• 7 Time-tested Strategies to Improve Email Open Rates For Your Campaigns

1. Work on your subject lines
2. Segment your audience
3. Do not buy email addresses; create and own an opt-in email list instead
4. Abide by all email marketing laws related to user and data privacy
5. Optimize all elements related to email design and copy
6. Get your timing right
7. Preview and test all emails before final send; also test after final send

• The Impact of COVID-19 on average email open rates
• Wrap Up

What Is Email Open Rate? How Is It Calculated?

In an effective email marketing campaign, metrics like click-through, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and forwards are all important. However, these stats don’t matter at all if your emails are not being opened in the first place. This is why your email open rate is one of the most important performance metrics you can – and should – track.

Most leading Email Service Providers (ESP) like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc. will automatically calculate your email open rates, so you don’t have to do it manually. You can see this metric on the main reporting page for specific email campaigns, so you can decide what, if any actions, you need to take to improve performance. Still, it’s important to understand where the number actually comes from.

Email open rate (also known as average email open rate) is a measure of how many recipients open your email compared to the total number of emails delivered.

In simple terms, it refers to the percentage of people who opened your email.

Here’s how it is calculated:

Open Rate = Unique Opens / (Number of Emails Sent – Number of Bounces)

So, if you sent 1000 emails, 900 of them made it through to your readers, and 75 were opened, the open rate for the campaign will be calculated as:

75/(1000-900) = 7.5%

What Is A “Good” Email Open Rate?

In addition to showing you how well your campaign is performing against its KPIs, the average open rates for email can also tell you how you stack up against the competition. Benchmark data can show you how your results compare to the average email open rates in your industry: is your open rate above, below, or on par with the industry average? This can provide some indication of the direction you need to take to improve your future results.

According to Campaign Monitor, an average email open rate of 15%-25% generally indicates campaign success. In 2020, the average open rate across all industries was 18%.

Constant Contact and Smart Insights report that the average email open rate 2020 (as of December 2020) across all industries was slightly lower at 16.06%.

These are average numbers. Actual open rates tend to vary for different industries.

Here is a small sample of average email open rates by industry according to Constant Contact:

And according to Campaign Monitor, average email open rates for specific industries (2020) were:

Despite these variances, there are some broad trends in open rates that endure across all industries:

• As the subscriber list size increases, the open rate usually falls
• Organizations that focus on enthusiasts and supporters (e.g. sports teams) usually see higher open rates
• Emails on more specific niche topics have higher open rates than emails on broader topics

Depending on your industry…

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